Bite-sized exercises for busy professionals to integrate ChatGPT into their daily workflows to save time, make better decisions, and achieve peak productivity.

Most people think they need to spend hours studying prompt engineering techniques to get the most out of ChatGPT, but the truth is, you can unlock 80% of ChatGPT’s potential for your work by using it in different guided scenarios for about 2 hours.

Rather than fixating on prompt engineering techniques this blog post exposes you to all the different ways you can use ChatGPT: for coming up with ideas, drafting writing, generating images, analyzing data, aiding the learning process and for self-reflection.

Most ChatGPT courses focus on crafting the perfect prompt. But the real key to productivity is understanding when to reach for ChatGPT and how you can use it.

Using ChatGPT to come up with ideas

Steph Smith, a prolific online creator, host of the a16z podcast, and author of “Doing Content Right,” wanted to plan a meetup for fellow internet enthusiasts. Steph wanted ideas for fun, internet-related activities that would break the ice and help start conversations among participants.

To help brainstorm ideas, Steph turned to ChatGPT. She crafted a prompt that clearly outlined her goals:

Hi ChatGPT, I'm hosting a meet up for fellow people who love the internet. I like to run a few ice breakers. What are some some good ideas for splitting the group into smaller groups? I like to have it be fun and internet related.

ChatGPT came up with a list of creative, theme-appropriate suggestions, such as “Meme Matchup,” “Emoji Charades,” “Social Media Speed Dating,” “Tech Time Capsule,” and “Internet Trivia Challenge.”

While she didn’t use any of the ideas verbatim, she liked the idea of a “Meme Matchup”. She decided to print out popular memes and place them on different tables, allowing attendees to choose their favorite meme when they arrive at the meetup.

ChatGPT was useful here because it saved Steph a bunch of time and mental energy by coming up with lots of decent ideas quickly. Even if the suggestions weren’t perfect, they still worked as a great starting point for her own brainstorming process.

Your Turn

To replicate Steph’s approach to using ChatGPT for idea generation, begin by identifying the theme or focus of your event, whether it involves a meetup, party, or workshop. If you’re not planning on organizing a meetup any time soon then use this exercise to come up with ideas for what you can do for a close friends next birthday party.

1. Start by crafting a clear, concise prompt that outlines what you want ChatGPT to do. You can use Steph’s prompt as a starting point or you can start with something as simple as “Brainstorm some ideas for things I could do for friends birthday”. The emphasis here is to start by asking for lots of ideas, not a single idea.
2. It’s unlikely that you will get great suggestions with such a generic request. The next step is to provide some useful context for ChatGPT to work with. If you are planning an event then explain the purpose of the event, who it’s for and why you are hosting it. Similarly, if you’re thinking of ideas for a friend’s birthday then describe your friend. When I’m providing context like this and I’m not sure where to start I will ask ChatGPT to make up some boilerplate to get me started (“Make up a fairly detailed description of my best friend and the kinds of things they like to do. One paragraph.”) and then I’ll edit the boilerplate with real details. Once you have your description then you can either edit your original prompt by hovering over it and clicking on the edit button or by asking for more ideas in a follow up prompt and including your context with the follow up prompt (“More ideas please. Here is some context about my friend to help you come up with more relevant suggestions: [insert description]”).
3. Next ask for some more examples but this time add some meaningful constraints to your prompts. Some ideas:
   1. Explain where you live and what time of year it is (as where you are and the season might influence your options).
   2. Include a budget (so that ChatGPT only suggests ideas you can use). Try specifying that it should include both smaller, intimate ideas as well as bigger, more elaborate ones within the budget (so that it doesn’t only propose ideas fixed at a certain price point).
   3. Specify how long you have to prepare. again, ask for a range of immediate and more well-thought out ideas within the timeframe you provide.
4. The next step is to ask for more ideas but this time you are going to provide examples you like (either meetup activities you have enjoyed in the past or things you’ve done for past birthday that worked well). Aim for 3 examples. Examples are great because it helps ChatGPT narrow in on your taste and preferences. If you want you can also include examples of terrible ideas so that ChatGPT knows what to stay away from.
5. You final prompt is to pick the top 3 ideas from all the ideas ChatGPT has generated so far and ask for more ideas like those. Additionally, briefly explain why you like these ideas so that ChatGPT understands what aspects of the ideas to focus on.

How to write with ChatGPT

Last year, my co-founder and I commissioned a small team of writers to research and write about how people used ChatGPT in different industries. We covered 15 different industries or categories and put together a distribution table of the kinds of work they used ChatGPT to do.

We found that the most common way people used ChatGPT across industries involved drafting documents. So, if you’re trying to figure out how to use ChatGPT at work, start by thinking about what written output you create regularly on a regular basis.

How Dan uses ChatGPT to write

Most of what I know about writing with ChatGPT I learned from attended a workshop by Dan Shipper. He covered six ways AI can help the writing process.

The first way involves capturing your thoughts

Dan writes interesting articles about artificial intelligence for his publication called ‘Every‘. When he has an idea for an article, he will capture it by recording a voice note. He will then take a transcript of this messy, initial version of the idea and ask ChatGPT to summarize it into bullet points for later.

Then organizing your thoughts

Another way Dan uses ChatGPT involves feeding his notes into a prompt and asking for an outline. This serves as a useful way to find the best connective tissue between ideas before committing to the writing process.

Styling those thoughts

ChatGPT excels at style. If you have a piece of writing and you want to inflect it with flavor, you can list out specific stylistic interventions in bullet points, like Dan has done in the prompt below.

Another way Dan alters the style involves asking ChatGPT to rewrite it in the style of a specific author. The more popular the author, the better ChatGPT performs at this. For more obscure authors, you can always include a sample of their writing and ask it to emulate the style.

Summarizing complex ideas

Dan also uses ChatGPT to summarize key concepts when he’s trying to explain something tricky. In the example below, he used ChatGPT to summarize “Utilitarianism” in three sentences.

Importantly, you should only do this when you know what you write about. If I tried to ask ChatGPT to summarize “Bayesian Statistics” in 3 sentences, I don’t know if the summary proves accurate since I don’t know much about the topic.

Getting unstuck

If you use ChatGPT for nothing else, use it to beat down procrastination.

When Dan gets stuck writing, he will copy in what he’s so far and ask for an outline of the rest.

You will almost never use the ideas it suggests. Watch ChatGPT trying to finish your essay, and everything wrong with its approach jumps out at you. You impulsively start to correct things. Seeing what you don’t want acts as a surprisingly effective way to get yourself writing when you get stuck.

Useful Feedback

Finally, Dan uses ChatGPT to evaluate his writing when he’s finished writing. You can ask ChatGPT for feedback and it will give you a useful perspective as an editor.

So there you have it, the six ways Dan uses AI as a writing tool:

1. Capture your thoughts
2. Organize your notes
3. Influence style
4. Summarize complex ideas
5. Help you when you get stuck
6. Evaluate your writing

This by no means represents an exhaustive list. The workshop took place over a year ago. I’m sure Dan uses ChatGPT in different ways now. The workshop still provides a brilliant overview of the main ways you can use ChatGPT to write.

How I use ChatGPT to write

As the co-founder of a software product, sometimes I use ChatGPT to draft PRDs. I want to show you a contrasting scenario so you can use ChatGPT for lots of different types of writing.

I will let ChatGPT explain a PRD, if you’ve never heard of the acronym.

A PRD, or Product Requirements Document, is a document that outlines the key features, functionality, and objectives of a product. It serves as a guide for the development team, helping them understand what needs to be built and why. The PRD is an essential tool for aligning stakeholders, including product managers, designers, engineers, and executives, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding the product’s goals and requirements.

Technical documents. No where near as much fun to read as Dan’s prose. Nonetheless, they matter. Here’s how I use ChatGPT to write them:

No need to use ChatGPT to capture thoughts because I usually have a clear idea of the feature I’m pitching when I sit down to write a PRD. Instead I use a prompt like the one below, which I used when I wrote a pitch to let users import CSV files into our app.

WRITE A PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT FOR A NEW FEATURE FOR OUR APP.

BELOW IS AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT OUR PRODUCT DOES AND WHO IT IS FOR, ALONG WITH A BASIC DESCRIPTION OF THE NEW FEATURE WE INTEND TO ADD.

###

WHAT OUR PRODUCT DOES: 
THE REASON TO USE OUR PRODUCT IS THAT IT LETS YOU CHAIN CHATGPT PROMPTS TOGETHER TO CREATE TEMPLATES FOR REUSABLE SETS OF TASKS OR WORKFLOWS. THIS HELPS YOU SAVE TIME AND BOOST PRODUCTIVITY.

WHO OUR PRODUCT IS FOR: 
THE TARGET MARKET HERE IS MARKETING AGENCIES.

FEATURE DESCRIPTION: 
THE FEATURE IS TO LET PEOPLE ADD CSV FILES TO THE PROMPT STEPS. THIS LETS PEOPLE RUN ANALYSIS ON CSV DATA AS PART OF A WORKFLOW. THIS COULD BE GREAT FOR CREATING CUSTOM REPORTS FROM LARGER, MORE COMPLICATED SETS OF DATA.

I included a description of our product, the target audience, and some basic details on the proposed feature. Rather than structuring this as one giant paragraph, I split the prompt out into separate sections which made it easier to update and reuse the next time I needed it.

ChatGPT generated a complete PRD in response to this prompt, but as expected, it sounded like garbage. Much too jargon-y and it was vague on the specifics where it mattered.

At this point in the process I spent about 10 minutes cleaning up any major misunderstandings. ChatGPT didn’t fully understand what the feature was, so I deleted some sections and added important details as bullet points where necessary. I ignore how the PRD is written at this stage. The goal involved making sure the substance made sense.

Most teams have their own particular way of writing PRDs. We settled on a slightly modified version of the approach Ryan Singer uses in his book ‘Shape Up’. Luckily for us, ChatGPT knows about ‘Shape Up’, so the following prompt sufficed to restructure the entire PRD:

REWRITE THIS PRD IN THE STYLE OF RYAN SINGER'S SHAPE UP

Now I had a PRD structured the way I wanted. At this point I spent about 20 minutes refining how it communicated things: cleaning up details, updating the language, removing anything unnecessary, and most importantly, adding actual sketches or screenshots of our product to relevant sections. This does not constitute something I would ever expect ChatGPT capable of. This step makes up the main chunk of “writing” when creating a PRD.

The next step involves getting some feedback on the pitch. I used ChatGPT to do a pre-mortem to scan for any obvious problems.

HIGHLIGHT THE MOST CRITICAL POTENTIAL FAILURES IN THE FEATURE DEVELOPMENT BASED ON THE DETAILS IN THE PROVIDED PRD

Then I wanted feedback from a specific perspective.

PRETEND TO BE AN EXPERIENCED CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGER. GIVE ME YOUR TOP THREE CONCERNS WITH THE FOLLOWING FEATURE.

You can repeat this and swap out ‘customer support manager’ for any role or department you want. Aim to anticipate any low-hanging fruit. That way, when you send the pitch to the customer support team, they will give you useful feedback instead of wasting their time with concerns ChatGPT could have anticipated.

Sometimes I also like to invert the question, and ask ChatGPT for suggestions on how to make the experience more delightful, rather than just treating it as a critic.

HOW COULD WE MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE DELIGHTFUL FOR THE FOLLOWING FEATURE?

You can also use ChatGPT to write out user stories, microcopy, and release notes for your PRDs, but I won’t get into that here. Feel free to go through the little PDF I’ve attached to this email on using ChatGPT to write PRDs if that’s your thing.

Your Turn

If you’re someone who writes blog post, then lean on Dan’s approach. If you have to produce technical documents, my way of using the same ideas might may prove more useful.

Either way, I’m going to give you a 20-minute exercise where you can apply all the principles we covered and make them easier to remember when you need them. Reading about how other people use ChatGPT is great, but nothing beats practice.

For this exercise, we’re going to write a quick progress report to update someone on what you are working on. No matter who you are, we all have to give someone updates. If you’re a boss, then you have to update your customers or fans. If you don’t have a manager, then you probably had to give your colleagues some kind of progress report.

I want you to spend 20 minutes using ChatGPT to write out an update on what you have been working for whoever you report to or share updates with.

• Getting unstuck – Unless you woke up expecting to write a progress report today, this may feel like a strange exercise to get started on. To get myself going, I started with “Please write out a progress update for my co-founder on what I have been working on lately. Explain what I am working towards, when I hope to achieve it by, and what the main challenges are at the moment.”
  
  Swap out “co-founder” for whoever you want to write to and swap out “progress report” for whatever word you’re more comfortable with for the kind of update you’re putting together.
  
  In order to make this exercise useful, please don’t treat this as hypothetical. Write an actual update for someone specific and tell them what you’ve been up to. If you really can’t think of someone then just writing to a friend telling them how you’ve been spending your time lately.
• Add in the specifics – I deliberately did not add specific details to the previous prompt because I didn’t want to get bogged down on the first step. Now that I have an entire example update written out, I have some momentum. The update can’t possibly be true because ChatGPT doesn’t know what you’re working on, so now go through the example and fix factual inaccuracies.
  
  I encourage you not to change the wording or tone of the update at this stage, just focus on the specific information you want to convey. I suggest using bullet points so that you don’t get caught up trying to “write”.
• Summarize complex ideas – If you’re working on something complicated, I suggest using ChatGPT. This is the prompt I used to explain a PRD earlier in the post: “What is a PRD? Please summarize in 3 sentences for a layperson.“
• Inflect style – Now that you have the substance down, let’s work on making it sound better. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to find a “progress reports” you’ve sent this person before and then ask ChatGPT to emulate it

Please rewrite the following progress update to match the style, tone and structure of these other progress updates I have sent them in the past.”)

###

Current progress update:

[paste current progress update here]

###

Past progress update 1:

[paste a past progress update here]

Past progress update 2:

[paste another past progress update here]

The three hashtags are called delimiters. They help separate distinct parts of a prompt so that ChatGPT doesn’t confuse your progress updates with the actual prompt. You don’t have to use hashtags; you can use any character you want as a delimiter as long as you are consistent.

If you have never sent this person a progress report before, then I suggest going over Dan’s style prompt from earlier in the post. You can also try asking it to emulate your favorite author and rewrite the update in their style, or you can ask it to match your writing style by providing an unrelated example of your writing.

• Finally, ask for some feedback – At the very least, get GPT to proofread your writing (“Please rewrite this content to identify and fix grammatical and punctuation errors.”). If you want a distinct perspective, consider modifying one of my feedback prompts from earlier in the post. If you want more editorial feedback, then modify Dan’s writing feedback prompt.

That’s it.

You now know how to write with ChatGPT. Hopefully, these examples and principles will seep into the many other forms of writing you have to do throughout your work week.

The most important takeaway is that at no point did we use AI to replace the writing process. We used it to get started, to organize our thoughts, to explain things, to get feedback… but we still did the actual “writing” bit ourselves. Trying to fully automate your writing process is a waste of time. ChatGPT is a relentlessly useful tool, but it is not meant to be a replacement to the writing process.

Using AI for Your Mental Well-being

According to research published in the Harvard Business Review, the most common way people use ChatGPT is to generate ideas. This finding came from an analysis of tens of thousands of posts on forums like Reddit and Quora.

Luckily we covered how to use ChatGPT to generate ideas in the first post in this series. Interestingly, the second most common use case for generative AI was therapy and companionship.

How to use ChatGPT for therapy

The first time I heard of ChatGPT being used in a therapeutic context was when Dan Shipper wrote a post about using GPT-3 to journal as a personal development practice.

Rather than staring with a blank page, he wanted journaling to feel more like a conversation. He would ask GPT-3 to pretend to be someone and then ask him questions:

You are Socrates, please help me with an issue in my life. Please ask me questions to try to understand what my issue is and help me unpack it. You can start the conversation however you feel is best.

Michelle Huang took this a step further in a Twitter thread about feeding her own journal entries into the prompt. This allowed her to have a conversation with a younger version of herself.

The prompt she used to do this was:

The following is a conversation with Present Michelle (age [redacted]) and Young Michelle (age 14). Young Michelle has written the following journal entries: [diary entries here] Present Michelle: [type your question here]

This was way back in 2022. At the time, one of the problems with doing this was limitation on how much text you could put into a prompt in one go. Thankfully the latest models let you work with a lot more text.

If you want to play with an entire year’s worth of journal entries then you can pay for the latest version of Claude and squeeze a ludicrous 500 pages of information into a single prompt.

If you do decide to use ChatGPT therapeutically, I recommend you turn your Chat History off so that your deepest darkest thoughts are not being used to train future ChatGPT models.

Using ChatGPT to Do a Yearly Review

Dr. Gena Gorlin, a guest on the “Every” podcast, shared her process of using ChatGPT to analyze her journal for a yearly review. She fed ChatGPT years’ worth of journal entries and engaged in a series of prompts to gain insights and guidance for the coming year.

First, Gena asked ChatGPT to read through her journal entries, saying that she was working on her 2023 year in review and gave it 5 years worth of journal entries.

She received a synthesized overview with key elements from each year, basically her recent life story neatly placed on a timeline.

Next, she asked ChatGPT to identify major themes that might emerge in the coming year based on the patterns in her entries, using the prompt:

"are there any major themes you anticipate emerging for me in the coming year given the patterns you see in my entries to date?"

She then asked ChatGPT to identify her potential blind spots for the coming year, and followed this up by asking for suggestions on the most impactful goals and intentions to set, using the prompt:

"what would you suggest is the highest leverage goals and intentions for me to set in the coming year?"

Conversely, she also asked ChatGPT about goals she should avoid setting, saying:

"what goals maybe I shouldn't be setting for the coming year you know in the spirit of being able to say no to things?"

When ChatGPT repeatedly mentioned “work-life balance”, not a term Gena uses often, she asked it to analyze her distinct perspective on work-life integration based on her journal entries, using the prompt:

"I don't actually like the phrase work life balance what insights have I in fact articulated about this in my journal and what's my distinct perspective on it if you can tell?"

She followed up by asking how she might specifically struggle with work-life integration in the coming year, and then inquired about high-leverage activities specifically related to a specific goal.

Finally, she asked ChatGPT to summarize and consolidate everything they had discussed during the session.

Your Turn

You can replicate Gena’s process by following these step-by-step instructions:

1. Compile your journal entries from the desired time period. If you don’t have any journal entries there is an alternative exercise for you below.
2. Ask ChatGPT to read through your entries and provide a summary of major themes, patterns, and insights (e.g., “I’m working on my [year] review and I’ve compiled my journal entries from the past [time period]. I’d like your help in analyzing and organizing my thoughts. [insert journal entries]”).
3. Seek specific insights: Ask targeted questions to gain deeper insights, such as:
   • What major themes do you anticipate emerging for me in the coming year, given the patterns in my entries?
   • What might my blind spots be in the coming year?
   • What high-leverage goals and intentions would you suggest I set for the coming year?
   • What goals maybe I shouldn’t be setting for the coming year?
4. Iterate and refine: Based on ChatGPT’s responses, continue the conversation by asking follow-up questions, providing additional context, or asking for clarification on specific points.
5. Summarize and plan: When you’re finished, ask ChatGPT to provide a final summary of your conversation and use this as a foundation for creating your own action plan or setting intentions for the coming year.

An Alternative Approach for People Without Journal Entries

If you don’t have any existing journal entries, you can still use ChatGPT for self-reflection and personal growth.

Try initiating a thoughtful discussion with the following prompt by Dr. Gena Gorlin:

"I want to have a thoughtful discussion to help me understand what I value and why. Please start by asking me what are some feelings that have come up especially strongly in this past week? For each feeling I name, ask me what I care about such that I feel this? Keep asking me why that's important to me until we get to a pretty core value (sort of like the 5 whys). At the end, summarize our conversation and the values that we identified. Ask questions one at a time rather than all at once."

Remember to approach the process with an open and curious mindset, and be willing to engage in multiple rounds of conversation with ChatGPT to refine and deepen your insights. It’s important to note that while ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for self-reflection, it is not a substitute for professional mental health support when needed.

Using ChatGPT to Create Your Own Custom Tutorials

In previous posts, we explored how you can use ChatGPT to come up with ideas, to enhance your writing process, and for self-reflection.

Today, we’ll focus on using ChatGPT to create your own personalized tutorials.

Everyone uses Google Sheets at work. Let’s say someone shared a document with you, and it had these fancy graphics in some of the cells. They’re called sparklines.

You can search for a tutorial on how to add these to your next Google Sheet, or you could just ask ChatGPT to show you how to do it.

1. Open up a new Google Sheet and create a column of random numbers. You can use ChatGPT to generate mock data for you ("Generate a column of about 20 mock numerical data points. Structure the output as a table so I can copy and paste everything into Google Sheets. No pipes please, just numbers.").
2. Then ask ChatGPT how to create a sparkline for this data ("How do I add sparklines to a Google Sheet? Please walk me through what to do step-by-step.").
3. This bit is dangerous because maybe ChatGPT got it right. Maybe it didn’t. Chances are it didn’t because you can no longer use sparkline charts in Google Sheets. A better way to approach this is to use Google to find the official documentation or a blog post on how to do something and copy it into your prompt. To save you a Google search, here is some documentation on sparklines, and here is how to feed that documentation into your next prompt in the thread (“Here is the official documentation on how to do this. Please check your instructions for accuracy. ### [copy and paste everything from the link above]”).
4. Now you can rely on the response because you know ChatGPT is drawing from an accurate source. Now follow the instructions and create the sparkline.
   In this case, the task wasn’t that complicated. The documentation wouldn’t have taken that long to read. However, you could drop an entire product manual into your prompt and asked for instructions on a specific task for any kind of tool. This is handy when you have to use obscure software at work. By including documentation or a how-to blog post in your prompt (or even a transcript from a how-to YouTube video), ChatGPT doesn’t need to know how your tool works and it can still build you a custom tutorial for your specific task.
5. Another huge advantage of using ChatGPT over Google’s official documentation is that you can ask it follow up questions when you get stuck. Even better, you can customize the responses to fit your level of technical expertise (“Can you show me how to make the sparkline blue and a little bit thicker? I also want to add some kind of visual reference for the highest and lowest values on the line. If this is not possible, please say so and help me understand what is possible instead.“). Giving ChatGPT explicit instructions to tell you when it can’t do something helps reduce its tendency to make stuff up.
6. I like to end these type of interactive tutorial sessions with ChatGPT by asking more open ended questions to understand a tool better for next time. Depending on the responses I get (and how busy I am), I will ask it follow up questions so that it elaborates on different ways to use a feature or aspect of the tool (“ Great. This worked. I now have a blue sparkline. Thank you. I'd like to learn more about sparklines, can you help me understand what else I can do. I don't have plenty of experience with Google sheets and I'm not very technical so please keep simple.”)

I picked Google Sheets for this exercise because everybody its an example everyone can relate to. The point of the exercise was to show you that you can use ChatGPT in this way. I encourage you to use ChatGPT to build your own custom tutorial for whatever tools and plugins you need to use for your work.

AI-Powered Image Creation for Work and Play

In previous posts, we explored how you can use ChatGPT to come up with ideas, enhance your writing process, for self-reflection, and design your own custom tutorials.

Today, we’ll focus on using ChatGPT to create images. Generating images with ChatGPT involves subscribing to the Pro version. If you haven’t subscribed or don’t intend to, you can still follow this exercise by using the free versions of Gemini, or Bing to create images.

For this exercise, let’s use AI to design a futuristic, eco-friendly house inspired by nature. 

1. Rather than trying to describe the image ourselves, let’s start by asking ChatGPT to come up with a prompt to generate the image. Give ChatGPT a clear objective for the kind of image you want, and then ask it to create a prompt for you. For example, “I want to create a prompt that visually describes the exterior of a futuristic, eco-friendly house inspired by nature. Can you help me come up with a detailed and imaginative prompt?”
2. Now that you have a starting point, you can edit any of the specifics in this description before you use it to create an image. Once you are happy, paste the prompt in your preferred AI image generation tool (ChatGPT pro, Gemini, or Bing in this case) and generate your futuristic, eco-friendly house concept. For example, “Please create an image based on the following description: [ insert the description of your house from the following step]”
3. The goal is to spend some time playing with the first image you get to see what else the image genrator can do. Iterate on the initial results and ask for more specific details or modifications in a series of follow-up prompts. For instance, :
   • Ask for the same house but made out of different materials. If you are not sure what kind of materials to ask for, go back to ChatGPT and ask for ideas of different materials a futuristic, eco-friendly house could be made out of.
   • The inclusion of certain nature-inspired elements or aesthetics. Again, if you’re not sure what these could be, get ChatGPT to job your imagination (“What are nature-inspired elements or aesthetics that could go into a futuristic, eco-friendly house?”)
   • Then, try changing the particular setting or environment of the house.
4. Once you have a satisfactory prompt for the exterior, move on to creating prompts for the house’s interior. Engage with ChatGPT to generate detailed descriptions for each of its rooms, such as:
   • The living room
   • The kitchen
   • The bedrooms
   • The bathrooms
5. So far, we’ve been using ChatGPT to generate ideas and descriptions that we use to create images. For the final step, let’s reverse this process and use the images to help ChatGPT come up with ideas. Let’s gain a deeper understanding of the design elements and principles used in your concept by asking ChatGPT to analyze our final (again, you will need to use Gemini or Bing to upload images into a chat if you are using ChatGPT Pro). For example, “Can you explain the key features that make this house design futuristic and eco-friendly? How does the inspiration from nature manifest in the design? [and then drop the images you want to be analyzed into chat]”

I understand that coming up with architectural plans for an imaginary house is probably not the most practical use for this technology if you’re not an architect. You can use a similar approach to create of images you need at work. Here is a short description of how Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, uses a similar process to create PowerPoint slides for his presentations. I use a similar process to generate blog post images when needed.

1. He starts by finding a Creative Commons image that roughly represents the image he wants Creative Commons and Pexels are good places to start) 
2. Then he uses Midjourney ( a more advanced AI image generation model. For our purposes, we can just use ChatGPT) to describe the image so that can can then modify the description to generate a new prompt. He adds a few keywords to the prompts to create a more exciting picture, such as “at a cafe,” “dramatic scene,” or “underwater.” This process takes just a minute or two and results in more engaging images than searching for stock photos online.
3. If he can’t find a good picture to start with then hand-draw a terrible Microsoft Paint draft of what he’s thinking of, upload it to Bing, and ask it to turn it into a better image. You can also just draw a crude picture on paper and then take a photo of it as a starting point.

Understand that AI image generation models are trained on existing art on the internet in ways that are not transparent and potentially legally and ethically questionable. Though technically you own the copyright of the images created, legal rules are still hazy. Using a Creative Commons image as your starting point helps reduce the chances of you stealing people’s artwork for your PowerPoint presentation.

Analyzing Reviews with ChatGPT

In previous posts, we’ve seen how ChatGPT can be used to generate ideas, enhance your writing, create tutorials, design visuals, and as a tool for self-reflection. 

Today, let’s explore how ChatGPT can help you make informed purchasing decisions by analyzing user reviews. You can use this approach to analyze AirBnB options for a work trip, to make a decision about which vendors or software to buy for your business, you could even analyze your own product or service. To keep things simple for the exercise, let’s choose a product from your Amazon Wish List to analyze.

1. Pick a Product from Your Amazon Wish List – For this exercise to work, you’ll need to choose a product that has plenty of reviews. Scroll to the bottom of the product page, just below all the reviews, you should see a button that says ‘See more reviews’. Click on this to go to the dedicated review page and then copy all user reviews into ChatGPT. Depending on the size of these reviews, you should be able to get about 100 reviews into your prompt. If you don’t want to tab through all the review pages for this exercise, just make sure you get a range of good reviews and bad reviews.
2. Begin your Analysis – Before you submit the prompt, scroll back up to the top of textarea and ask ChatGPT to tell you what people like about the product based on all the reviews you pasted into the prompt (“Please tell me what people love about the following product based on all of these reviews: [all the reviews you pasted into the prompt]). 
3. Ask for complaints – Next, ask ChatGPT what people didn’t like about the product (“What are some things guests didn’t like?”)
4. Get Specifics – Now pick a specific quality and ask for more details about what people said regarding that aspect of the product. ​​For example, I did this exercise with a fountain pen I have my eye on. One of the complaints that came up was ‘Nib Scratchiness,’ so I followed up with  “Can you please tabulate all the quotes that cover what people had to say about Nib Scratchiness.”. I got a nice little table with the name of the reviewer on one side and their quote about Nib Scratchiness on the other side.
5. Ask for a summary – Now I’d like you to take a step back and get a more relative understanding of what reviews about your product.
   
   I used the following prompt for a bird’s eye view analysis: “Please give me a summary of the most frequently mentioned positive. then a summary of the most frequent negative aspects of the product. I would like you to tabulate this information along with the number of people who mentioned these themes, expressed as a percentage of total reviews submitted.”
   
   I ended up with a table that let me compare the good bits to the bad bits. More importantly, I could now see that while some people thought the Nib was Scratchy, more than 4 times as many people felt the pen offered a smooth writing experience. 
6. Credibility Check – you can also use ChatGPT to run more subjective analysis. For example, I would like to know if there are any fake reviews that would distort my analysis so far. You can use to following prompt to pull any reviews that might warrant further investigation (“Please help me assess the credibility of the reviews. Show me any reviews that seem suspicious, such as those with repetitive language, excessive praise, or vague details. Please print the whole review and explain why you flagged it.”)

If you are considering multiple similar products, you can repeat these steps and then ask ChatGPT to compare the reviews of your selected item with those of its competitors. This is useful for a side-by-side comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each product based on the reviews. It’s also useful if you have a specific set of criteria and you want to test the products against. For example, “I plan to use the pen while on a hiking trip, which one will be better for writing outdoors and why”. And if you’re still unsure by the end of it, you can always just ask ChatGPT to provide a final recommendation based on the analyzed reviews.

Using ChatGPT to Outsource Work to a Real Person

In previous posts, we explored how ChatGPT can be used for idea generation, writing, creating personalized tutorials, designing text-to-image prompts, self-reflection, and analyzing reviews. 

Hopefully, by this point, these exercises have helped you remember to reach for ChatGPT in more and more aspects of your daily work. If you have started exploring what kind of work ChatGPT can do for you, you will undoubtedly have run into tasks that it can’t do (or just doesn’t do well). So today, we will use ChatGPT to help write a job description so that you can outsource the work it can’t do to a real person.

1. Start by identifying a specific task or mini-project you want to outsource – I recommend spending $20 to $50 and putting an actual job post up on Upwork for this exercise. This is optional, but if you run through the exercise and have everything set up, it will be that much easier the next time you need to do this for real. If you have a specific job in mind, please use that. If you don’t, then I suggest we put together a mini-research project.

I suggest you put a job post together to study real people in your field who have used ChatGPT in interesting and meaningful ways. The goal of these exercises has been to expose you to all the different ways you can use ChatGPT. We’re going for breadth here, not depth. I recommend you complement the process by paying someone to spend some time going deep and looking for use cases that are specific to your industry and profession.

Research is a good type of job to outsource. The Pro version of ChatGPT can access the internet and will do a basic Google search for you, but it’s certainly not the first tool I reach for when I want to do preliminary research on a topic.

2. Put together your Job description – Luckily for us, Upwork has examples of effective job descriptions they recommend following. These include four key details: the Project scope and objectives, Required skills and expertise, Deliverables and timeline, Budget and payment terms. 

Based on this general structure, I put the following prompt together and attached the example job descriptions. Since the free version of ChatGPT won’t let you upload the images of the examples, you can try using the free version of Gemini instead.

I need to create a job posting on Upwork to help me find stories about exciting ways people are looking people at using in HR. Please help me write a compelling job posting that clearly communicates these requirements and attracts the right talent. I have also attached some examples of effective Upwork job posts for you to emulate. 

 – Project scope and objectives: I would like 5 case studies or anecdotal stories about real people who used ChatGPT in their work as an HR professional. I don’t just want a list of prompts and use cases. I want actual stories of people, how they used it, and what they achieved. 

– Required skills and expertise: I want to hire a researcher. Someone who has experience doing effective online research. I don’t want someone to do a basic Google of the topic and summarise what they found on the first page of results.

 – Deliverables and timeline: I would like this done in less than a week.

 – Budget and payment terms: I can pay up to $50 for five stories. So, $10 per story that you find. 

3. Add in some specificity

• I went through the job post and made sure everything made sense. For example, it said that the job required writing skills. This is not true, so I took that bit out. I don’t pay too much attention to tone, but if you want to adjust that, you can always refer back to the writing with ChatGPT exercise.
• Then, I will add in any idiosyncratic details I wouldn’t expect from ChatGPT. For example, at the end of an Upwork post, I will ask applicants to start their application with a random word like ‘Hippopotamus’. This just lets me eliminate applications from people who haven’t taken the time to read the whole job description.
• The most important step is to find an analogous example of what you want and add it in as a reference. This is an in-depth human story I found about Dan Shipper learning how to use  ChatGPT to write prose. This example emphasizes the objective of the job description, which is to find an actual story of a real person, that covers how they used ChatGPT and what they achieved with it.  It shows what kind of length I’m looking for, and while it does have examples of prompts used, it is not just a listicle of prompts https://every.to/chain-of-thought/writing-essays-with-ai-a-guide 
• To go the extra mile and highlight the point above about not finding listicles, I put together a list of what I don’t want. I want to emphasize that I am looking for someone to do more than a Basic Google search. So I asked ChatGPT for a list of all the ways I could use ChatGPT for HR work along with examples prompts (“Please give me a list of useful ways someone in HR could use generative AI tools like ChatGPt and Claude. Please give me prompts I could use for each of these use cases.”). Then I searched YouTube for ways to use AI in HR and asked ChatGPT to summerise any interesting use cases from the top five videos I found (“Here is a transcript from a Youtube video about using chatGPT in HR. Are there any new use case or prompts you can add to the list based on this? : [paste transcript]”). Then I repeated the same process with the top results from a Google search (“Are there any new use cases and prompts we could add to the list based on the following article: [paste in a copy of the article]”. This whole process took about 10 minutes and gave me a comprehensive list of common prompts and ways people use ChatGPT in HR that served as a benchmark for applicants to beat.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KnoJw92Jho-7b6UvjwOXIgrhf1Zr62-Kr69mj8OYFfA/edit 

4. Now set up Upwork –  At this point you will need to spend 10 minutes setting up a new Upwork account if you don’t have one. You can always run through this exercise and not hire anyone, but I do recommend setting this platform up so that its ready for when you need it next. You don’t need to use Upwork, any gig marketplace will do.   

Apart from having somewhere to post work that you can’t get chatGPT to do, the other reason to do this is that the skills needed to work with people remotely for odd jobs are very similar to the skills needed to get the most out of ChatGPT.  It’s not about how you draft the job post, it’s more about what you communicate with a virtual assistant and how you structure the interaction. Providing examples, clarifying key concepts, keeping tasks clear and focused, and understanding the ideal level of complexity for a job you can outsource. Understanding the subtleties here comes from practice, and the better you get at working with virtual assistants the better you will become at working with ChatGPT.  

5. Now that you have a live job posted on Upwork, it’s time to write a social post so that you can share the job post on your social platforms.

Write a LinkedIn post for my friends to share the job in their network. Start with an emotional hook, be optimistic, and create a sense of urgency. Focus on why it’s an exciting opportunity, including exposure, benefits, and perks. End with how to apply and the application deadline. Keep the post within 75 words. 

6. While we are at it, we might as well start thinking about follow up questions we will want to ask applicants before we hire them.

Pretend to be a seasoned HR Expert. For the Job Description below, I’d like you to provide me with a set of 10 open-ended questions for candidate interview evaluation that can be used to check candidate abilities across the following criteria: relevant work experience, specific technical skills, ability to work in a team, leadership skills, critical thinking, communication skills, attitude and motivation. Explain why each question is relevant and what qualities it tests. Keep each question within 10-15 words. Write in a formal tone in a professional writing style.

Job description:
[paste in job description]

7. Then let’s put together a set of responses that we can copy and paste when we want to to let them know that we’re interested in working with them or not

I’d like you to draft out two job offer responses. One to let the candidate know they have received the job and another for the scenario where they have not been selected.

5. And finally a testimonial that we can update once the job is complete.

Write a professional and objective review for Bob, a freelance researcher I recently hired on Upwork, to find stories about how AI was being used in HR. The review should include:

1. A brief description of the project and the freelancer’s role from the job description below
2. Their overall performance and quality of work – which was positive.
3. Communication and responsiveness throughout the project- which was also great.
4. Timeliness in delivering work and meeting deadlines – which was good.
5. The reason(s) for terminating the contract – because they successfully finished the project.

Please keep the tone professional and factual, focusing on the freelancer’s performance and the reasons for ending the contract. Avoid using emotional language or making personal attacks. Remember to be honest and fair in your assessment, as this review will impact the freelancer’s ability to secure future work on the platform.

In this exercise, we posted a real job on Upwork for odd jobs you can’t get ChatGPT to do, complete with interview questions, response templates, and a social post. This was an important exercise because the next time you sit down and ask ChatGPT to do something, you can just think about how you would ask a real person to do the work instead. You won’t have the excuse of thinking that ChatGPT can’t get the job done. If it really can’t then you can always just post the job on Upwork. That said, thinking about how to structure the work, what level of context you need to provide, and collecting examples you can share will always result in a better response from ChatGPT.